Cisco Appoints New CTO, Exits Flash Storage Business

Cisco announces End of Life for Invicta flash storage, announces new CTO and Chief Digital Officer.

Cisco starts a new era today as new CEO Chuck Robbins takes the reigns. The Robbins era begins with new executive appointments and comes on the heels of Cisco's exit from the set top box market and the Invicta storage business.

Cisco announced on July 24 that it is exiting the Invicta flash storage business. Cisco acquired flash storage vendor Whiptail in September 2013 for $415 million. Whiptail's top-end product, the Invicta storage array, scales all the way up to 360 TB.

In January of 2014, Cisco announced its plans for Whiptail integration with Cisco UCS systems. Now, after just over 18 months trying to make a go of the Invicta business, the company is throwing in the towel.

"Cisco is prioritizing the elements of our portfolio to drive the most value for our customers both now and in the future, and today, we are announcing the End of Life (EoL) for the Invicta Appliance and Scaling System products," Cisco stated. "We will continue to support existing customers who have deployed Invicta products in accordance with our Products and Services End of Life Policy, which includes ongoing technical assistance, software support and spare/replacement parts. "

Moving forward, Cisco plans to continue to innovate on UCS while sourcing flash storage solutions from the Cisco Partner ecosystem.

New Cisco executive appointments

Cisco today is also announcing the appointment of two new leaders to its ranks: Biri Singh, appointed the new CTO, and Kevin Bandy, the new Chief Digital Officer.

Singh had been a venture partner at Khosla Venture from October 2014 until now and had been General Manager of HP's Cloud business from February 2011 until February 2013. At the OpenStack San Diego Summit in 2012, Singh advocated for the use of Service Level Agreements (SLA) for the public cloud. Singh is also a supporter of open clouds, which aligns well with Cisco's support of OpenStack.

Singh replaces the well respected Padmasree Warrior.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.